N.c. Company To Buy 2 Basf Plants

BASF Fibers will sell the two James City plants it put on the block last fall to a consulting firm run by a former BASF employee, officials for both businesses said Friday.

The deal allowing T.M.G. Holdings of Greensboro, N.C., to take over BASF Fibers' acrylic fibers and spun yarn plants should be completed by the end of June, said Joe A. Mann, president of The Mann Group, a private company and the parent of T.M.G. Holdings.

Both Mann and Bob Taylor, a spokesman for BASF, declined to disclose the acquisition price.

The plants, which employ close to 400 people, didn't fit into long-term plans, said officials of BASF Fibers, the James City-based division of West German-based BASF AG.

Though a majority of BASF's 700 employees in James City work at the two plants, Taylor said the company has no plans to move its division headquarters or two smaller plants out of the county.

"This doesn't mean we're pulling up stakes and moving," he said.

BASF still owns more than 600 acres in James City, where its other two plants make a carbon fiber for aircraft and a fiber that reduces static electricity in carpets and clothes.

And Mann, director of research and development at the James City plants from 1972-82, said that though his 2-year-old company has never managed a manufacturing plant, "our primary specialty is textiles."

Mann said his company has three full-time employees and subcontracts problem-solving, market-development and corporate-restructuring work to consultants.

He declined to disclose the value of contracts the firm handled in 1988, the individual jobs the company had undertaken or the number of consultants he had employed. "I prefer not to be more specific," Mann said.

The former BASF Fibers employee said he couldn't say if he will keep staffing at the current level. "Obviously we're going to have to do some restructuring."

Because demand for acrylic clothing has declined this decade and government-subsidized foreign companies can make the fibers for less, BASF Fibers closed one of its James City plants in 1986, cutting the work force from 610 to 485. Acrylic fiber production fell from 50 million pounds per year to 25 million.

BASF Fibers controlled about 5 percent of the acrylic market, both Taylor and Mann said. The competition consisted mainly of giants Monsanto Corp., DuPont and American Cyanamid. In 1988, the acrylics business brought in about 5 per cent of BASF Fiber's $900 million in sales, Taylor said.

The spun yarn plant, on the other hand, attracted considerable interest when the company announced it was for sale, he said.

Taylor said it was the company's intent all along to sell the plants to an owner interested in both. "We didn't want to sell just one and not the other."